Overview
Fricke et al. (2022) methods discuss how in the “using functional traits (especially binary or categorical traits), one can overestimate the ecological similarity of species, and thus the similarity of interaction patterns”.
The Paleo Food web Inference Model (PFIM, Shaw et al. (2024)) uses a series of rules for a set of trait categories (such as habitat and body size) to determine if an interaction can feasibly occur between a species pair.
Methods
References
Fricke, Evan C., Chia Hsieh, Owen Middleton, Daniel Gorczynski, Caroline D. Cappello, Oscar Sanisidro, John Rowan, Jens-Christian Svenning, and Lydia Beaudrot. 2022. “Collapse of Terrestrial Mammal Food Webs Since the Late Pleistocene.” Science 377 (6609): 1008–11. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abn4012.
Shaw, Jack O., Alexander M. Dunhill, Andrew P. Beckerman, Jennifer A. Dunne, and Pincelli M. Hull. 2024. “A Framework for Reconstructing Ancient Food Webs Using Functional Trait Data.” https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.01.30.578036.